Tuesday, 16 January 2018

Ode to Dolores

Dolores
is dead.

Somewhere in
the dusty corners of the Slacker’s home is an audio cassette of The Cranberries’ debut album, Everybody Else
is doing it, So why can’t we? Also present there is the audio cassette of
their sophomore album No Need to Argue
and their fourth, Bury the Hatchet. In
a much less dusty part of the house – in fact at my elbow as I type, is a CD of
Stars – The Best of 1992-2002, to
which I listened last week.

In terms of
album possession then, this puts The Cranberries just behind Pink Floyd in my collection, though one
might struggle to find any other commonality between the psychedelic and later,
concept-rock of the 1970’s that Floyd embodies and the alternative-folk sound
of Dolores O’Riordan and her merry men.

But there is
a topicality to music, regardless of genre, and in the songs of The Cranberries
there is a sadness and a sense of longing that made them relatable precisely in
the manner of Floyd. In the strange days that were the nineties, The
Cranberries represented a way for a Mumbai schoolboy to make sense of violence
and ache, to deal with love and loss, an escape from social awkwardness.

Dreams was where I could forget reality
for its four-minute-odd duration, as she sang

‘Oh my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems,

Never quite as it seems’.

Ode to my Family helped me
make sense of the daily oppression of urban life as she sang,

‘Unhappiness, where’s when I was young and
didn’t give a damn’.

Zombie was an outlet for the rage within me,
a way to make sense of the violence as she screamed,

‘In your head, in your head,

they are fighting,

with their bombs and their guns,

In your head, in your head,

they are
crying’.

Salvation scared me, despite the
plaintive cry of

‘Salvation, Salvation, Salvation is free’.

Animal Instinct, felt like a
ray of much-needed hope, a plea to,

So take my hands and we will pray

They won't take you away

They will never make me cry, no

They will never make me die

I can’t be with you embodied a
sense of inevitable losses to come,

And now it's just farewell

Put your hands in my hand

We'll find another end

and Linger…ah, Linger…perhaps the song I related to only much later, when it
became an accusation directed, quite rightly, at me.

You know I'm such a fool for you

You've got me wrapped around your finger

Do you have to let it linger?

Do you have to, do you have to, do you have to let
it linger?

Running
through all these songs, and more, was Dolores’ voice, an ethereal chant, an
expression of womanhood, vulnerable and strong, coming from the beauty of the
Irish country and the strife of its history; it was the tragedy of the
occupation and the famine, the smile of Irish eyes and the merriment of their
art, it was unique – it was enough.

Dolores
O’Riordan was not a frontwoman in the mould of the ice-cool beauty of Debbie Harry or the quintessential
rocker chic of Joan Jett, she did
not own the stage with the raw sexual charisma of Shirley Manson or the idiosyncratic glamour of Stevie Nicks. She drew, perhaps, most from the free spirit of Janis Joplin, and like her, has left us
too soon.

The 21st
century has not been kind to music-lovers, I often think, and music-lovers have
not been kind to music. The commercialisation of the industry and the
predominance of auto-tune has made it difficult for a raw act like The
Cranberries to achieve the sort of mainstream success that they were able to in
the early nineties. The album and the music video itself is on something of a
decline as streaming takes over from digital purchases just as digital
purchases took over from those poor CD’s and cassettes that I still hold on to.
We have given far too little love to the artistes we do love either – the
children of the 80’s and 90’s like me grew up to get involved in other things,
to get degrees and jobs, to start families and businesses, and if we listened
to music at all, it was more likely to re-hash those old records than to buy
new ones, even when they were brought out by those we had loved so much. It did
not help that the very mass media – Radio and Television – which had first
introduced us to these musicians gleefully abdicated their responsibility in
pursuit of reality shows and competing with General Entertainment Channels.

And so Wake up and Smell the Coffee (2001) went
largely unnoticed, as did Roses (2009)
and so did Dolores’ solo albums, Are You
Listening (2007) and No Baggage (2009).
But then that was what happened to the albums released by such icons as Prince, David Bowie, Motorhead, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Glen Campbell, the Allman Brothers and Chuck
Berry (and that’s just naming a few of those who passed away in 2016-17).

And now it
is Dolores who is dead, and as we did for those before her, we will have an
awakening, remember who she was, and the band she fronted, and wonder where
they were for the last twenty years, shed a silent tear, write a glowing
tribute, pirate their albums and play them for a day or two. If we are a little
more principled, we might buy or stream their work. And as it was for Bowie and
Prince and Petty, it will be a tad too late, for there will be no new music to
listen to.

So cherish
what you love, put your money where your mouth is, and do not let all that
remains of your love for music a vague memory of a cassette in a Walkman, of
songs heard sitting alone in your bedroom as an angst-ridden teen. Your idols
grew older, they made music they loved and put into words and voiced the
concerns and travails of a different time and place from that you first loved,
perhaps, and the charts may not reflect their names any more, but the art never
went away.

Let us mourn
Dolores, for indeed a part of our memories – mine, surely – go with her, to
remain only in the power of her voice, but let us also remember to appreciate
and love those we have, and most of all, to express the love, in words, and
through our wallets.

That
dusty corner of a home where your voice is encoded on magnetic tape and
plastic, a technology long since obsolete, may one day be cleaned, and the
cassette-tape thrown away, but in a dusty corner of a crusty, cynical man’s
heart, Dolores, your memory will always linger.

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About Me

Percy Slacker was bitten by Schrodinger’s Cat as a child, and has since then combined a deep fear of cats with an
abiding conviction that he both exists and does not exist at the same
time. This existential doubt has led him
to grow up to be a writer while not actually being a writer.

He lives in Mumbai with his family, his book collection and a firm
conviction that modern civilization is in an interminable decline.